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Monkish accuracy: full justification of monospaced plain text documents.

edited October 2021 in Writing

Michael Tsai featured a couple quotes from Matt Gemmell recently about monospace plain text and fully justified layout:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2021/09/30/manual-full-justification/

The linked twitter thread is worth a look.

The real banger is this document: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114

You don't have to actually read it; it's a guide/walkthrough for a Super Nintendo game. The interesting detail is that the author accomplished full text justification without tweaking the spacing between words. That's how you usually accomplish that effect in e.g. MS Word or other desktop publishing applications. The space between words is stretched.


(Somewhere from the middle)

But here, there's only ever 1 space between words.

So the author had to write everything to fit. Conversely, that means words and sentence structures had to be picked because of their length to properly fill the available space.

Matt Gemmell points out that this is not a feat one is likely to accomplish for the lulz. It's serious effort. And that document sure as heck is long! Now that's some plain text dedication :)

Author at Zettelkasten.de • https://christiantietze.de/

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